LINGUSTIC VARIATION AND ITS SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE

As we know, there are five main key areas of sociolinguistics, namely, personal characteristics, linguistic styles, social characteristics, socio cultural factors and sociological factors. I personally believe that because of these, there are linguistic variations. However, I am a little bit uncertain about how linguists make decisions about the causes and results of these variables. Chambers, J.K (2009) states that ‘A speaker who is fluent but vague will seem to us to be evasive, perhaps deceitful, and one who is articulate but hesitant will seem pensive and thoughtful’. In my opinion, this is not very realistic. Therefore; I don’t agree with this idea. I have a friend who speaks fast and vaguely because speaking always creates panic to him. He is not a self-confident person and he does not seem to overcome this but this does not have anything with his personal character but his problems with communicating people. I mean, if a person speaks vaguely and fluently, that does not mean this person is deceitful. There may be psychological reasons or different experience behind it and linguists should make more research about it. They should not make decisions about personal characteristics and their effects on linguistic variables quickly.

I also want to say that there is another important aspect in determining language variants: Hawthorne effect. Murray says ‘the behaviour of any given experiment‘s subjects is changed just because the subjects perceive themselves as participants in the experiment’ This is the fact that when somebody observes you, you become a different person and speak accordingly. You go away from your behaviours and modify your speech. This is absolutely valid for me. I cannot even write something when my teacher is near me because this irritates me. I write and erase, I try to form different sentences and try to explain what I want to write differently even though I know that the teacher does not read what I am writing, but I cannot change my mind. This is also very clear in my speech. When I realize that I am observed, I unconsciously start to speak differently (actually I try not to form wrong sentences and speak without hesitation). At that point, I wonder why linguists do not try to find ways to avoid Hawthorne effect on people interviewed? It is a necessity because linguists make decisions after they interview with them and try to find in what situations they vary their speech. Therefore, in order to make the research more natural, they should try to avoid Hawthorne effect as much as possible first. I think they should work with psychologists.